In 1725 the first edition of
The New Science of Giambattista Vico was published. It was ignored
for at least a hundred years, and did not really come into its own until the
twentieth century. Then those historians and social scientists who began to
realize that a universal and inter-related science of man was becoming a
necessity of thought, if the nature of man was ever to be known, found that
Vico had made precisely this claim two centuries before. Vico insisted
that, if a full history and understanding of man was to be known, the myths
of earlier times ought to be taken seriously as themselves accounts of the
actual history of those times. "The fables in their origin," said Vico,
"were true and severe narrations (whence mythos, fable was defined as
vera narratio, as we have frequently noted). But because for the
most part they were originally monstrous, they were later misappropriated,
then altered, subsequently became improbable, after that obscure, then
scandalous, and finally incredible."(1)

Vico further proposed that, in
that stage of history when rationality became ascendant, a collective
amnesia took place; men denied that their own historical origins were
contained in those myths, which were, by this time assumed to be merely the
distortions and exaggerations of credulous and ignorant imaginations. Vico
attacked the prevailing Cartesian ortho­doxy of his day for ignoring the
fertile resources of the human memory and imagination. Instead it was
concentrating exclusively on men's capacity to think abstractly, rationally,
and in straight lines. "What the Cartesians generally call method is only
one species of it, that is the method of geometry. It behooves us to
emphasize, instead, that there are as many methods as there are subject
matters to be dealt with."(2)

In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky's
Worlds in Collision was published. It was certainly not ignored,
though many attempts were made to consign it to oblivion. It has not taken
it one or two hundred years to force itself upon the attention of scientists
and scholars from a host of disciplines, although it may take that long and
more before its claims become unobjectionable. In it and subsequent works,
Velikovsky makes the case anew for a unified science of man based upon a
probe into his memory and an examination of the roots of his imagination,
this, in order to bringboth myth and logos back together, so
that the history of man may be fully understood within the cosmos in which
he has been a very involved participant. It was Velikovsky's thesis that,
in the ancient myths, legends and religious origins of man, we find reliable
evidence that the earth and its people have experienced and recorded a
series of devastating cosmic catastrophes.

The parallels between Vico and
Velikovsky should not be pushed too far; Vico's understanding of myth, for
instance, was ethnological not celestial. The Vico renaissance, however,
links up in a significant way with the work of Velikovsky to form the
subject of the present paper. It is its thesis that, in certain instances,
myth is a more reliable method than any other for reporting events, and,
secondly, that a new science of man demands a recognition of the equal
validity of both parts of his dual nature; that imagination and analysis,
intuition and rationality, are necessary tools for a full understanding of
both human history and human nature. These dualities, I propose to show are
based upon relatively new discoveries concerns the operation of the human
brain.

It has long been known
that the brain does not simply record all ex­periences that impinge
upon it. The organism has no apparatus for per­ceiving many forces
that directly impinge upon it, and it systematically disregards
complex regularities in the environment, once it has mastered them.
Much of this is a necessity of Survival. If everything in one's
environment, after all, had to be attended to consciously the
organism would be inundated with more stimuli than it could manage.
A person must be able to respond to the most pressing stimuli that
impinge upon him in the interests of survival. Ornstein puts it
well:

Personal consciousness
is outward-oriented, involving action for the most part. It seems
to have been evolved for the primary purpose of ensuring individual
biological survival, for which active manipulation of discrete
objects, sensitivity to forces which may pose a threat, separation
of oneself from others are very useful. We first select the
sensory mod­alities of personal consciousness from the mass of
information reaching us. This is done by a multilevel process of
filtration, for the most part sorting out survival-related stimuli.
We are then, able to construct a stable consciousness from the
filtered input.(3)

This process of
selection is also governed by the person's most salient needs and
wishes, for which the sensory or selective threshold is lowered so
that appropriate objects can be perceived in a figure to ground
relation­ship. Thus, when a person looks out on the world he will
tend to find a world that supports his particular construction of
it. Moreover, this is a process that quickly becomes automatic and,
therefore, unwitting. Since we tend to assume that consciousness is
our surest guide to knowing, then it quickly becomes implicit to us
that what we perceive with our senses is all there is. While it is
true that man has managed to extend his awareness of the cosmos far
beyond the limits of his naked senses, science, which has
accomplished this feat, remains firmly wedded to a faith in the
rationality and sufficiency of man's consciousness. This, in turn,
informs him of the rationality of the universe and its subjection
to invariable and unchanging laws. As much as man has discovered
about the universe and himself, through his confidence in his
rational consciousness, it is. nonetheless, a circular and
self-serving system. The more rational the cosmos, the easier it is
to control, hence man's survival in it is more effectively secured.
He has only to operate on the assumption that he and the universe
are rational for his consciousness to select the appropriate
information in order that he may conclude that they are.

There, of course,
remains much in the world that does not fit into this program for
control and survival−things that are unpredictable, unique, and non-rational. Some of these may be denied, ignored, or attacked
while other such phenomena are cherished and even celebrated, as
art, play and religion-but they lack immediate survival value,
although they do "make life worth living." Immanuel Velikovsky has
challenged the cardinal as­sumption of this entire scheme-the
fundamental orderliness, constancy and rationality of the cosmos.
He has drawn upon evidence from precisely those areas of experience
the function of which is to edify and en­tertain to support a
scientific hypothesis. He asks us, in a word, to place as much
confidence in the nonrational as in the rational, in the
imagina­tion as in reason. We are to believe that the heavens are
inconstant and unpredictable, the earth subject to episodic
upheavals, and that we are to rely upon the ambiguities and
imprecision of works of the imagination and of religious faith to
enable us to more fully understand the world. Velikovsky does not
ask us to forsake science and embrace the irrational−nothing could
be further from the truth−but what kind of science would be possible
were logic and intuition, rationality and imagination to unite in
examining a not always predictable and not always constant cosmos?

In recent years it has
been discovered that the active and selective functioning of the
human brain, with its penchant for verbal, rational and sequential
thought processes represent only one of two modes of the brain's
operation. The brain is, of course, made up of two hemispheres
which are joined together by a large mass of interconnecting fibers
called the "corpus callosum." For a long time, however, it was
assumed that virtually all the brain's important resources were
located in the left hemisphere, in spite of the great Hughlings
Jackson's suggestion in 1864 that: "If, then, it should be proved by
wider evidence that the faculty of expression resides in one
hemisphere, there is no absurdity in raising the question as to
whether perception−its corresponding opposite−may not be seated
in the other." (4) The prevailing view was represented by Henschen's
view that the right hemisphere was merely a "regressing organ"
although "it is possible that the right hemisphere is a reserve
organ."(5) As recently as 1967, Gazzaniga was only able to suggest
rather vaguely that "in certain other mental processes the right
hemisphere is on a par with the left. In particular, it can
independently generate an emotional reaction." (6) It can now be
concluded, says Ornstein, that:

The left hemisphere
(connected to the right side of the body) is pre­dominantly involved
with analytic, logical thinking, especially in verbal and
mathematical functions. Its mode of operation is primarily linear.
This hemisphere seems to process information sequentially. This
mode of operation of necessity must underlie logical thought, since
logic depends on sequence and order. Language and mathematics, both
left-hemisphere activities, also depend predominantly on linear
time.

If the left hemisphere
is specialized for analysis, the right hemisphere (governing the
left side of the body) seems specialized for holistic mentation.
Its language ability is quite limited. This hemisphere is primarily
responsible for our orientation in space, artistic endeavor, crafts,
body image, recognition of faces. It processes information more
diffusely than does the left hemisphere, and its responsibilities
demand a ready integration of many inputs at once. If the left
hemisphere can be termed pre­dominantly analytic and sequential in
its operation, then the right hemis­phere is more holistic and
relational, and more simultaneous in its mode of operation.(7)

The right hemisphere
does not appear to be selective in its operation by imposing its
needs and assumptions upon the environment-but ap­pears, instead, to
be global and receptive. As such, it seems to correspond to what
Arthur Deikman calls the "receptive" mode; left hemispheric
dominance, on the other hand, would correspond to what he calls the
active" mode of the organism. According to Deikman, "the receptive
mode is a state organized around intake of the environment rather
than manipulation."(8) The agencies that dominate, when the mode is
in the ascendancy, are the sensory-perceptual system over the muscle
system, diffuse over focused attention, paralogical thought
processes over object-based logic, decreased instead of heightened
boundary perception, and the dominance of the sensory over the
formal characteristics of objects. Which of the two modes will
predominate in a given situation has to do with "the goal of the
organism's activity, whether or not the environment is to be acted
upon, or whether stimuli or nutriment are to be taken in . . . In
the pure state of the receptive mode, the organism does seem
helpless to act on the environment, as in states of ecstasy or drug
intoxication."(9) Or, one might suppose, a cosmic catastrophe!

The operation of each
mode is rarely an all-or-nothing thing, but rather a matter of
predominance. Nor, in their different functional orientations of
taking in versus acting on the environment, should the receptive
mode be thought of as regressively ignoring or retreating from the
world, though either or both may be the case; it is simply a
different strategy for dealing with the world. It would be the more
appropriate course when there is nothing that can be done to alter
the environment. It may also predominate as a healthy corrective to
the intense survival concerns of the active mode, and be exercised
in fantasy, play or relaxation. It is, Deikman suggests, a strategy
for the present moment rather than for the future.

In the midst of an
unexpected or catastrophic event the receptive mode would be more
appropriate than the verbal-rational active mode. When things are
unpredictable or unprecedented, logical and sequential reasoning
would have no prior experience upon which to conceptualize or
select what would be the most survival-relevant stimuli to attend to
and act upon. Everything would be a potential threat to survival.
All the person could do would be to receive or take in what was
happening. Only the capacities of the right hemisphere of the brain
would be suitable for such a situation: the sensory-perceptual
image, the whole situation, one's orientation in space rather than
time, the immediate moment rather than the sequence of events.
Deikman's description of the psychotic response to personal
catastrophe is an apt one for a catastrophe of cosmic proportions as
well:

The control gates are
thrown down, and the world floods in through the senses and through
the inner stores of affect and memory. The action mode is
abandoned. When the person begins to drown in the overload, he
asserts control in a delusional compromise that to some extent
restores order and effectiveness while providing a substitute
object.(10)

There has in recent
years grown up a tendency to recognize in the psychotic response
less a total disintegration of the personality than the strategy of
a person inundated by inconsistent, illogical and unpredictable
information. It is information which cannot be fitted into the
customary rubrics for control and rational understanding, to
organize what is happen­ing in a global, imaginary way, with
boundaries diffused and emotions guiding perceptions. This process
leads to a highly subjective, consensually invalid, and non-rational
response to the situation. But, considering the bombardment of
simultaneous and disorienting imponderables upon the individual, it
is thought that his peculiar solution brings them all together about
as well as could be expected-and, in its own way, as
logically−under the circumstances.(11)

The visitation of a
catastrophe of cosmic proportions upon the peoples of the earth
might well be likened to a kind of collective psychosis, with the
exception of the fact that, since the experience would have been
shared by all, the response would be at least approximately similar
and, therefore, consensually validated. On every side man would be
inundated with a rain of destruction and danger far too great for
his normal capacities to cope with. The active mode of response
would be immobilized, for there would be virtually nothing that
could be done to control or even escape the situation. Only the
receptive mode could operate, for the organism, both individual and
collective, could only receive what was happening. In order to
discern the meaning of it all, or even just to stay alive, formallanguage, logical sequences of events, assumptions of constancy
and ration­ality would be hopelessly inadequate. But images,
stories, personifications−all responses of the receptive mode, of
the right hemisphere of the brain−would be the most appropriate and
effective means for registering the totality of the event, as well
as for deriving meaning from it. In short, myth would be the
best vehicle available for receiving and recording events too
overwhelming and unprecedented for the rational and sequential
responses that are appropriate for more customary times.

The question of why it
was that history gives us no formal records of the catastrophes
Velikovsky describes, instead of only myths, folklore, and tales of
religious origins, is really not that puzzling. Events of theproportions Velikovsky describes could simply not be reported
with ob­jectivity and rationality. The brain could not function in
that manner under such circumstances. Those who experienced the
events were so inundated that they could only experience
what was happening receptively and globally. Myth, the action of
the gods, is the supreme human creation for providing meaning in a
total and imaginary sense. Moreover, myth, as a reception of the
totality of an occurrence is not selective or eliminative−it cannot
presume to be−and therefore contains within itself the most
complete representation of the catastrophic event that could be
obtained under the circumstances.

A myth may be said to
be an event that cannot be rationally and analytically understood.
Myth personifies and tells a story about powers that are awesome or
overwhelming. As such, they cannot be rationalized, that is to say,
reduced to abstract and conceptual categories, logical and regular
processes which, in turn, imply a predictable sequence of events.
Once an event or process is thereby intellectually mastered it has
been demystyfied. Where once a myth was needed in order to
characterize or interpret the meaning or total significance
of an event, such a need no longer exists. In other words, myth is
a response to the absence of human mastery when confronted by the
presence of awe or wonder. A cosmic catastrophe would obviously be
such an event, but, of course, it would not be the only
cir­cumstance in which myth was called upon to explain or interpret
what was happening. Any situation in which man is helpless to act
or unable to understand and verbally conceptualize would, in
responding with a mythological interpretation ' be a function of The
receptive, nonverbal, totalistic activity of the right hemisphere of
the brain. As soon as myth becomes verbalized, invariably through
oral communication, it calls upon the verbal capacities of the
brain's left hemisphere. In this way an integration of experience
and comprehension is brought about. But, it is an integration in
which, due to the role of the image and of total meaning, the right
hemisphere would predominate. As the events which myth interprets
become more rationally understood, the verbal and rational
capacities of the left hemisphere would gradually take over, and
myth would be regarded more and more as a work of the imagination;
in Vico's words, "they were originally monstrous, they were later
misappropriated, then altered, subsequently became improbable, after
that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible." (12)

Given the threat to
survival, the terror and loss of control involved in a cosmic
catastrophe, man's rational and verbal consciousness would indeed be
little inclined to remember the event, any more than it would have
been originally able to cope with or effectively record it. An
experience as awesome and unprecedented as a cosmic catastrophe
could not even be registered by the verbal brain, only by the
perceptual brain. As the memory of the experience was passed from
generation to generation, there eventually comes a time when man
would gradually realize greater rational understanding and mastery
of the regularities that he found in the cosmos. Then, the rational
mental apparatus of the left brain would invariably, finding no
experience remotely comparable to cosmic catastrophe, interpret the
personified description of the events as foreign to its way of
experience, and, therefore, as works of the imagination. This
denial of his earlier experiences by more rational man is directly
comparable to what Ernest Schachtel has called, in one of the two
classic works of psycho­analysis, childhood amnesia. He writes:

The categories (or
schemata) of adult memory are not suitable receptacles for early
childhood experiences and therefore not fit to preserve these
experiences and enable their recall. The functional capacity of the
conscious, adult memory is usually limited to those types of
experience which the adult consciously makes and is capable of
making.(13)

Further on Schachtel
is more explicit:

The incompatibility of
early childhood experience with the categories and the organization
of adult memory is to a large extent due to what I call the
conventionalization of the adult memory. Conventionalization is a
particular form of what one might call schematization of memory.
Voluntary memory recalls largely schemata of experience rather than
experience. These schemata are mostly built along the lines of
words and concepts of the culture. . . . Obviously the schemata of
experience as well as of memory are determined by the culture which
has developed a certain view of the world and of life, a view which
furnishes the schemata for all experience and all memory. . . .
Every fresh and spontaneous experience transcends the capacity of
the conventionalized memory schema and to some degree of any
schema. That part of the experiencewhich transcends the
memory schema as performed by the culture is indanger of
being lost because there exists as yet no vessel, as it were, inwhich to preserve it.(14)

The division that
exacerbates the problem that Schachtel describes, and the same one
described in classical psychoanalysis between the conscious and the
unconscious, is the way the left hemisphere registers events−verbally-and the way the right hemisphere performs that
function−perceptually and totalistically. The human problem, both
individually and collectively, is that of overcoming this division.
A person could then draw upon the integrated resources of the whole
brain, and not merely the right hemisphere when the person is in a
position to master the environment. Thus far human life seems to
be a matter, literally, of the right hand not knowing what the left
hand is doing.

Is not myth, however,
as a work of interpretation, of the diffuse boundary perception and
emotional involvement of the right hemisphere's re­sponse, subject
to exaggeration and distortion in its report of an event? How can
it be, as the present paper suggests, a more, not less, accurate
record of what has been observed? As personified interpretations of
other­wise mysterious events, myths involve less rigorous regard,
certainly, for the strict canons of objective accuracy demanded by
our rationalistic culture; the more so since myth is more concerned
to ascertain the meaning of an event than to dissect the
facts of a situation. Nonetheless, it is a common experience or
event that myth is an attempt to comprehend. It cannot ignore the
commonality of that experience, for myth must satisfy not just one
person or even a handful of people, but an entire tribe or culture.
It must make sense of a problem or mystery in the common ex­perience
of a community of people. The first twelve chapters of Genesis,
for instance, bear little resemblance to anything that is likely to
have happened historically, except perhaps for the Deluge. Yet,
this work attempts to answer fundamental questions−how the world
began, how evil, suffering, murder, and the discord produced by
language differences came about -in ways that speak meaningfully to
the common existential concerns, not merely of one culture, the
Israelites, but of generations of men and cultures across two
millennia.

Myth, then, is not
merely a subjective creatio ex nihilo, but the
interpretation of a situation that has been commonly experienced.
It entirely lacks the arbitrary quality that is implied by the
term subjective. Instead it may be said to be the response of the
right hemisphere to an event rather than the left. The story of
Phaethon, as an example, is not just a fairy tale about a "once upon
a time" when the sun ran from its course, but an interpretative
response to an experience commonly observed. Apart from the
personification of the event as described by Ovid, it is in no way
allegorical, nor is it described in a fanciful or even exaggerated
way. Phaethon, the impulsive son of Helios, begs his father to
grant hirn one favor−to drive the chariot of the Sun through the
heavens just once. As might be expected, he drives it in his
customary impulsive way, carelessly and improperly, until he crashes
into mythical river Eridanus. The events that accompanied this wild
occurrence are described entirely naturalistically, and as they
doubtless would have taken place had the earth's normality been
interrupted:

. . .the earth in
flames,
Mountains touched
first, hills, plateaus, plains,
The dry earth
canyon-split, the fields spread white
In ashes; trees,
leaves were branches of the flames
While miles of grain
were fuel for their own fires -
But these were the
lesser losses I regret.
The great walled
cities perished; nations fell.

. . . . . . . . . . .
. . .Then Libya.

Became a desert where
wild flames ate the dew,
Even the rain that
swept across her grasses;
. . . .And fire tossed
on Babylon's Euphrates,
Fire on Orontes and
rapid Thermodon
And on the Ganges,
Phasis, and the Hister;
Alpheus boiled and
banks of Spersheos
Were streamed with
fire while the golden sands
Of Tagus melted in
flames.
. . . Nile ran in
terror to the end of earth
To hide its head which
now is still unseen;
Its seven mouths fell
open, filled with dust,
The seven beds
scorched dry, the same fate falling
On Thracian rivers,
Hebrus and Strymon,
And rivers of the
West, Rhine, Rhone, and Po -
Tiber, whose promise
was to rule the world.
Earth-wide, great
canyons opened to the sun,
And to the fears of
Pluto and his queen,
The sky shed flares of
light throughout their kingdom;

The seas shrank into
sand and from their waters
The hidden mountains
rose and Eastern islands
Came where the waves
had vanished.(15)

In a similar vein Ovid
describes the Flood of Deucalion:

At his command the
mouths of fountains opened
Racing their mountain
waters to the sea.
Under the blow of
Neptune's fork earth trembled,
And way was open for a
sea of water:

Where land was the
great rivers toppled orchards,
Uncut corn, cottages,
sheep, men, and cattle
Into the flood. Even
stone shrines and temples
Were washed away, and
if farmhouse or barn
Or palace still stood
its ground, the waves
Climbed over door and
lintel, up roof and tower.

All vanished as though
lost in glassy waters,
Road, highway, valley,
and hill swept into ocean,
All was a moving sea
without a shore.(16)

The naturalistic
quality of Ovid's description of catastrophic events are all the
more remarkable when it is considered that he not only wrote
hundreds of years after any such events would have happened, but he
by no means took the accounts seriously as literal or historic
records. It is, of course, a commonplace of modern literary
criticism to assume that the course of time would have led to
exaggerations and embellishments in stories passed on over hundreds
of years. Such assumptions are made by people who no longer need to
rely on their memories as the ancients did. Moreover, the accounts
as they did come down by the time of Ovid preserve a remarkably
naturalistic quality in terms of what conceivably would have
happened under circumstances of great catastrophe, as has
already been pointed out. This would appear to speak well for the
faithfulness of the oral traditions of ancient times.

Velikovsky maintains
that the Trojan War which forms the basis for Homer's Iliad takes
place against the backdrop of heavenly spectacle of Mars (Ares) and
Venus (Pallas Athene) appearing to take sides in the battle below,
the former with the Trojans, the latter with the Greeks. As the two
heavenly bodies appeared to contend with one another in the skies
above, the earth was not immune from the struggle, as Homer notes:

Discord the mighty
barrier of nations, loud shouted Athena, standing outside the wall
on the edge of the moat, or moving upon the seashore: Ares shouted
aloud from the other side, black as a storm cloud, crying his
commands from the citadel of Troy, or speeding over Callicolone by
Simoeis river.

So the blessed gods
drove the two hosts together and made the bitter strife burst
forth. The Father of men and gods thundered terribly from on high,
Poseidon made the solid earth quake beneath, and the tall summits of
the hills; mount Ida shook from head to foot, and the citadel of
Ilios trembled, and the Achaian ships. Fear seized Hades the lord
of the world below; fear made him leap from his throne and cry
aloud, lest Poseidon Earthshaker should break the earth above him,
and lay open to every eye those gruesome danksome abodes which even
the gods abhor−so terrible was the noise when gods met gods in
battle.(17)

The great founding
event for the people of Israel, the deliverance at the Sea of
Passage, also fits the rubric of those Greek myths that describe
colossal natural events: the natural event is described in great
detail, while the significance of the event alone is mythologized.

Then Moses stretched
out his hand over the sea; and the LORD drovethe sea back
by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land,
and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into
the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them
on their right hand and on their left. The Egyptians pursued, and
went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh's horses,
his chariots, and his horsemen. And in the morning watch the LORD
in the pillar of fire and ofcloud looked down upon the
host of the Egyptians, and discomfited the host of the
Egyptians, clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily;
and the Egyptians said "Let us flee from before Israel; for the LORD
fights for them against the Egyptians."

Then the LORD said to
Moses, "Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come
back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their
horsemen." So Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the
sea returned to its wonted flow when the morning appeared and the
Egyptians fled into it, and the LORD routed the Egyptians in the
midst of the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and
the horsemen and all the hosts of Pharaoh that had followed them
into the sea; not so much as one of them remained. But the people
of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters being a
wall to them on their right hand and on their left. (Ex. 14:21-29)

Even the famous event
of Joshua and the "day the sun stood still" contains, in the midst
of the obvious wonderment of the Biblical account, mention of what
seems to refer to something like a hail of meteorites preceding the
miraculous event, suggesting that, here too, may be a remarkably
faithful record of an actual event, albeit, of course, interpreted
in terms of divine intervention:

And as they fled
before Israel, while they were going down the ascent of Beth-horon,
the LORD threw down great stones from heaven upon them as far as
Azekah, and they died; there were more who died because of the
hailstones than the men of Israel killed with the sword.

Then spoke Joshua to
the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the men
of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel,

"Sun, stand thou still
at Gibeon,

and thou Moon in the
valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

Is this not written in
the Book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and did
not hasten to go down for about a whole day. There has been no day
like it before or since, when the LORD hearkened to the voice of a
man: for the LORD fought for Israel. (Josh. 10:11-14)

In the above tales we
are dealing with accounts that were written down a few hundred years
after the events to which they refer which, in the case of the
Biblical accounts at least, creates problems of redaction, the
conscious and intentional manipulation of the text. However, the
descriptions of the natural events involved do not, for the most
part, seem to suffer much of what could be called marked
exaggeration. They are rather straight-forward and seem generally
consistent with what might well be expected to happen on the earth
were a celestial body to come as close to it as Velikovsky suggests.

Let us now examine
some of the myths of the destructions of the three worlds from the
oral tradition of the Hopi Indians of the South-Western United
States. These myths have not been put into writing during a period
of what may be over three millennia. (It is interesting, in this
connection, that the Hopi consider themselves to be the first people
to have arrived in the Americas). According to their mythology, the
world has been destroyed three times, in each case because of the
wickedness of mankind. Just before the destruction of the first
world the Hopi were told by Sotuknang:

"You will go to a
certain place. Your Kopavi (vibratory center on top of
the head) will lead you. This inner wisdom will give you the
sight to see a certain cloud, which you will follow by day, and a
certain star which you will follow by night. Take nothing with
you. Your journey will not end until the cloud stops and the
star stops." .

... When they were all
safe and settled Taiowa commanded Sotuknang to destroy the world.
Sotuknang destroyed it by fire because the Fire Clan had been its
leaders. He rained fire upon it. He opened up the volcanoes. Fire
came from above and below and all around until the earth, the
waters, the air, all was one element, fire, and there was nothing
left except the people safe inside the womb of the earth.(18)

The second destruction
of the earth is a brief but fascinating descrip­tion of the kind of
cataclysm Velikovsky describes:

So again, as on the
First World, Sotuknang called on the Ant people to open up their
underground world for the chosen people. When they were
safely underground, Sotuknang commanded the twins, Poqanghoya and
Palongawhoya, to leave their posts at the north and south end of the
world's axis where they were stationed to keep the earth properly
rotating.

The twins had hardly
abandoned their stations when the world, with no one to control it,
teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled
over twice. Mountains plunged into seas with a great splash,
seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the world spun through
cold and lifeless space it froze into solid ice.(19)

The third world is
destroyed by flood, according to the Hopi tradition, a flood,
moreover, which contains many similarities to the Biblical Deluge.
Following Velikovsky's chronology of catastrophes, the Hopi Deluge
seems out of order, unless, of course, that part of the world was
flooded some­time during the events around 750 B.C. It seems more
reasonable to suppose, however, that, over a period of thousands of
years of oral tradition that the order of such awesome events, the
nature of which was remembered to a remarkably accurate degree, was,
nonetheless, rearranged, possibly for schematic reasons associated
with the Hopi religion.

We are not, in the
present paper, in any position to make an exhaustive study of all
myths of catastrophe, much less to compare them with other
categories of myth. The pattern that does seem to be common to
those that we have examined is that the imaginative element, which
plays an unmistakable role, is restricted to the interpretation of
why the gods chose to act in the awesome ways that they did. The
consequences of their decisions are, on the other hand, described in
ways that are exaggeratedonly with respect to the
assumptions of a uniform and constant cosmos. It may be
supposed that the events themselves were so overwhelming that there
was no room for exaggeration, only an awestruck taking in of the
spectacle which was inundating people. This, however, is exactly
what one would expect if the brain received what was happening in a
total rather than a rationally and verbally selective sense, that is
to say, with right rather than left hemispheric predominance.

The selective activity
of the verbal brain appears to have acted much as it would be
expected to act in the life of an individual following a series of
traumatic experiences. The appropriate defenses are mounted so that
a view of the world can be sustained that is indisputably constant
and uniform. An individual who has had a terrifying and highly
insecure childhood is extremely sensitive to subsequent insecurity
and seeks, at all costs, to create and sustain an unalterably secure
and stable world. He will be intolerant of evidence of instability
and lack of control in both himself and in others. A similar
process seems to have occurred on an historical scale, particularly
in the West. Indeed one might speculate that the unprecedented
creative outburst all over the known world in religious thought in
the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, in which we find the
prophets of Israel, Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the Buddha, would have
represented the quest for a spiritually stable center, given that
the visible world was manifestly so unstable.

Soon thereafter, in
his rational thought, however, man apparently began to look for more
tangible sources of security, and even began to deny that the
celestial world was, or could ever have been, unstable or
inconstant. It is generally considered that, in Western thought,
such a watershed took place in the work of Plato and Aristotle. The
pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus most notably, had founded
their thought on a frank recognition of the transiency and
inconstancy of the world. Plato, in some senses, bridges the past
recognition that there has been dramatic inconstancy in the past, in
the quest for a basis for a source of unquestioned stability. At
virtually the same time as he acknowledges that there have been
great cataclysms in the past, Plato urges that those who do
entertain such dangerous beliefs be severely punished. In the
Laws, that strange work of his old age, Plato declares that the
most dangerous and subversive teachers are those that deny the
eternal constancy of the heavens. To Plato, such constancy is the
only guarantee we have for intellectual, political and moral order.
As Stecchini* points out, Plato, and later Aristotle, seem to
protest altogether too much that a planet may not become a comet,
and a comet may not become a planet. Finally, Plato proposes that
those who persist in believing in a universe subject to chance and
unpredictability be imprisoned for five years, after which, if they
still refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways, they be put to
death. (20)

* One of the
contributing authors to The Velikovsky Affair - Ed.

Yet it is a younger
Plato who describes the effect of drastic changes in the heavens
upon the earth. He reports that: "There is a time when God himself
guides and helps to roll the world in its course; and there is a
time, on the completion of a certain cycle, when he lets go, and the
world being a living creature, . . . turns about and by an
inherentnecessity revolvesin the opposite direction.
. . . Of all changes in the heavenly motions, we may consider this
to be the greatest and most complete." Plato adds: "Hence there
necessarily occurs a great destruc­tion of (animals) which extends
also to the life of man." (21) Then there is the remarkable
statement in the Timaeus that:

There have been, and
will be hereafter, many and divers destructions of mankind, the
greatest by fire and water, though other lesser ones are due to
countless other causes. Thus the story current also in your part of
the world, that Phaethon, child of the Sun, once harnessed his
father's chariot but could not guide it on his father's course and
so burnt up everything on the face of the earth and was himself
consumed by the thunderbolt−this legend has the air of a fable;
but the truth behind it is a deviation of the bodies that revolve in
heaven round the earth and the destruction, occurring at long
intervals, of things on earth by a great conflagration.(22)

Plato appears to stand
at that time when men were of a strong disposition to deny the
oral and written memories of what had once happened by creating
rational systems of thought that would provide for them the sense of
security and control that they could never have if they continued to
believe that the earth was indeed subject to periodic destructive
upheavals. Plato himself addresses the fact that, even by his time,
the memory of great catastrophes had vanished to the point where
such accounts as were available were dismissed as "little better
than nursery tales." He has the Egyptian priest address Solon saying
that "you know nothing of it because the survivors for many
generations died leaving no word in writing."(23) To this Velikovsky
replies:

The memory of the
cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written tradition, but
because of some characteristic process that later caused nations,
together with their literate men to read into their traditions
allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were
clearly described. (24)

The characteristic
process of which Velikovsky writes is the penchant that humans have
to seek to regularize their environment. This is done by
reducing it to rational and verbal categories, the better to control
the situation by being in a position to anticipate what is likely to
happen next, and for the foreseeable future if possible. Indeed,
where possible, man seems disposed to avoid having to resort to the
receptive mode in which the right hemisphere of the brain
predominates, except as a momentary escape from the rigors of a
linear and controlled existence. The left side of the body, which,
of course, is the side governed by the right hemisphere, is
associated, the world over, with qualities of life that, in some
cultures, like our own, are regarded as suspect, and in others are
regarded as sacred, mysterious, creative, feminine, passive, and
intuitive. According to William Domhoff:

Folklore has it that
the "Right" is good and the "Left" bad in Western thinking,
particularly political thinking, because of the seating arrangements
in the French National Assembly of the Eighteenth century−the
nobles sitting on the king's right, the then upstart capitalists
sitting on his left. However, Theodore Thass-Thienemann..... an
expert on psycho-linguistics, has shown that this right-good,
left-bad polarization has been present for a very long time in the
entire Indo-European language family, as well as in Hungarian, a
non-Indo-European language. Further, psychologist Sylvan Tomkins .
. . has shown that the underlying assumptions dividing the political
Left and Right are also the basis for age-old ideological disputes
in mathematics, philosophy, science, and child-rearing. The work of
these two men suggests that the real problem is why the nobles
supposedly sat on the king's right hand in the first place.(25)

Ornstein suggests that
the right-left dichotomy is virtually synonymous with Freud's
conscious-unconscious duality. "The workings of the 'conscious'
mind are held," he points out, "to be accessible to language and to
rational discourse and alteration; the 'unconscious' is much less
access­ible to reason or to the verbal analysis. Some aspects of
'unconscious' communication are gestures, facial and body movements,
tone of voice."(26) It would be equally valid to pair the right side
and the ego, and the left side and the id. "The ego," says Freud,
"represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id
which contains the passions."(27)

Man is led by his ego
generally because, when he can conceptualize and rationalize events,
the world seems more within his control, more secure and
predictable. But when the id is allowed to predominate, with its
indifference to time, its inability to clarify boundaries, its
absence of logic, both the self and the world are in an
unpredictable, irrational state of affairs in which the organism is
forced to be at the mercy of events. This is not a very comforting
situation for man, the only animal that knows that it must die some
day, and therefore, wants to control the environment so as to
postpone that day as long as possible. Thus, in a sense, it might
be said that the penchant for control and predictability in the
human race plays much the same role as the ego does in the
individual: it provides a sense of security and mastery, and keeps
at bay as many of the forces of chaos as possible. We may even
perhaps speculate that man's reluctance to be open or receptive to
the world, and thereby vulnerable, was dealt a particularly severe
blow by the terrors of the cosmic catastrophes that he, perhaps many
times in his history, was forced to experience, and in the face of
which he was completely helpless and vulnerable. (28)

It is not surprising
that the realization that the right hemisphere of the brain was
responsible for the performance of many important and hitherto
neglected capacities of a nonverbal, non-rational nature has come at
the time it has. Western man is beginning to appreciate the
possibility that he has overdeveloped himself verbally, at the
expense of nonverbal, non-rational and intuitive skills that he had
virtually forgotten that he had; or at least that they could be of
any value to him. Psychoanalysis represents the first realization
in modern Western culture that the neglect of the receptive
dimensions of man's nature has serious adverse consequences on his
behavior, both personally and collectively. Personal and social
health can only exist, said Freud, as the split in man, between his
conscious self and his unconsciousness is overcome. Indeed the
development of an ideal of the whole or integral person seems to be
rapidly overtaking the traditional ideal of the good person. This
is largely due, in fact, to the influence of psychoanalysis, and the
schools that have developed in its wake, in demonstrating the
deleterious effect of the development of only one side of the
personality.

Coming as he has out
of the psychoanalytic tradition, Immanuel Velikovsky's work
represents a major attempt to reintegrate man's forgotten past with
his rationalized awareness of himself and his history. By his
application of the psychoanalytic method of rooting our buried
memories of traumatic incidents in the past, in this case of the
human race itself, Velikovsky shows us what a unified science of the
totality of man's ex­perience in the cosmos is able to accomplish.
Perhaps not everyone pos­sesses the capacity to develop the
necessary mastery of as many disciplines as this remarkable
individual has done to be able to formulate such an all-embracing
theory. The next thing to that, and perhaps in some ways even
better, is for scholars representing the many disciplines that are
found to converge, when such grand theorizing as this is attempted,
to begin to work together in recognition of the interrelationship
and interdependency of all things within the cosmos. While we have
reaped immeasurable benefits and an unprecedented amount of
knowledge by a rational and conceptual examination of objects as
they are separated out of the environmental field so that they can
be subjected to detailed and sequential analytic, the very extent of
that knowledge is now making us aware that all objects are
influenced by each other in a vast network of relationships. If we
are to genuinely understand the universe in which we live, we must
find ways of examining the totality and interrelationship of
things. That involves, not just a pooling of scholarly resources,
but a new way of grasping scientific truths, one that deals in
wholes, fields, gestalts, rather than with separate objects,
specimens, and controlled variables−or at least in relationship to
these more traditional methods of science.

Velikovsky's method of
unearthing the buried memories of cosmic catastrophe, as well as his
mastery of so many fields by discerning their relationship to one
another, suggests the path that such a new science of man and cosmos
must take. In order to grasp the total context in which events
occur, it is not sufficient merely to rely upon rational, sequential
and verbal thought. In addition to those approaches, the faculty of
intuition which, by its very nature, is able to receive the whole
picture of a situation is required. It is an axiom that is
accompanied by a legion of anecdotes, from Archimedes in his
bathtub, to Kekule's dream of the snake eating its own tail, that
intuition accompanies rationality and leads it in most if not all
great scientific discoveries. Intuition, however, seems like such
an irrational, random quality to depend upon in work that it demands
as much precision, control, and order as does scientific work. It
does not, after all, come just when it is beckoned but,
proverbially, "in a sudden flash," and, often, the harder it is
sought the more surely it eludes. Yet much of the apparent
unreliability of intuition may well have to do with the fact that it
is left to chance, and not cultivated.

Idries Shah, in his
fascinating work The Sufis, (29) maintains that the
beginnings of modern science began under the influence of those
mystics of Islam whose teachings strongly emphasized the cultivation
of the intuitive quality of the mind as essential if one would
learn to understand the full truth of things in their total context,
rather than in isolation. If modern science would fully understand
the whole truth of things, then it is time that the intuitive
capacity of the mind were cultivated and developed. Since we now
know that that elusive talent is a product of the previously
neglected and poorly understood right hemisphere of the brain, we
may come to realize that intuition is not some indefinable,
irrational, mystical claim to call upon only when all rational and
sensible explanations are insufficient. Now that we know it exists
in a tangible place, so to speak, and that it has the capacity to
receive stimuli in their totality, we may begin to find that it can
offer us a tool by which to understand the various con­texts in
which all things are imbedded. and be able to do better science
because of it.

By his willingness to
listen to his own intuition and thereby free himself from the
rational assumptions which bind most of us, Velikovsky was able to
show how a category of human thought that was not considered to have
anything to do with science could illuminate hidden and forgotten
events in human history, thereby more fully completing our
understanding of history, of human nature, of the earth and the
solar system. In addition, it enabled him to articulate an entirely
new element within the interrela­tionship of celestial bodies,
namely electromagnetism. A goodly portion of the continuing animus
against Velikovsky from within the scholarly and scientific worlds
has been precisely because people trained exclusively within
disciplinary boundaries are simply incapable of understanding an
argument that claimed to be scientific but drew upon material from
areas that were not classified as having to do with science. Then,
when Velikovsky proceeded to introduce new constructs like
electromagnetism in space to explain how events could take place,
when Newtonian celestial mechanics apparently denied that they
could, it seemed prima facie evidence that he was entirely
outside the boundaries of legitimate science. But what Velikovsky
was doing was blazing the trail of a new science, one that would
exclude no area of human activity from its purview, and would be
willing to draw upon all the resources of the human mind-rational
and intuitive-to create, as the psychoanalyst does with the
individual, an integrated and whole history, rather than a
fragmented and selected history of man and cosmos. Only such a new
science is equal to so all-encompassing a task.

28. Alfred de Grazia
explores the implications of these experiences for the subsequent life
of man in his work on the palaetiology of human fear which formed the
basis of an address entitled "Palaetiology of Human Fears" at the
Velikovsky Symposium on Cultural Amnesia, held at the University of
Lethbridge, May 1974.